Book Review: A Learner's Paradise by Richard Wells

Recently I took some time to read A Learner's Paradise, Richard Wells' praise of the New Zealand education system. He makes a compelling case that New Zealand is the best place to be a learner in the world. His main arguments are that we have a system set up to be responsive to learner needs because we have a very open-ended curriculum and we have several other structures set in place to allow educators to adapt their practice to the children they see each day.

I agree with much of what he says, up to a point. Certainly our curriculum is one of the best to work with if you are a teacher. There are many broad ideas, rather than specifics. We don't have a set plan that's the same for every child. There's no one telling teachers that you have to teach fractions at a certain time of the year and in a predetermined way. We have Key Competencies that are overarching for our curriculum, which help us as educators mould our learners into citizens who engage with society and try to better it.

Schools also have a great deal of autonomy in New Zealand. We are essentially self-governed and are able to determine what and how we teach. Teachers here have the opportunity to grow and learn. Our standards are based upon growth, not competency. Every three years a teacher needs to show work towards developing their capabilities rather than just ticking boxes. The way this appraisal process work is determined by schools and in many cases by the educators themselves.

Schools in New Zealand are free to interpret all of these documents as they wish (within reason of course). And through that interpretation, we have had some amazing things come to be: KidsEdChatNZ, The Mind Lab, CORE education and others. New Zealand teachers have it pretty good, and so do New Zealand learners.

The book also delves into some amazing practices that are happening in New Zealand schools. Two of my favourite were Kids Domain Kindergarten and Breen's Intermediate School. Wells told a story of children at Kids Domain going to visit a parking garage and then returning to class and coming up with designs to make a better parking garage in an example of Design Thinking being used with very young children. Breen's Intermediate has different spaces designated for different modes of learning (see the picture below) paired with the ability of learners to design their own school days to make an extremely innovative and learner centred approach. Those and the other examples (and many others not in the book) prove just how amazing a school in New Zealand could become.

All of that sounds rosy and amazing. However, I don't feel as though many schools take advantage of these amazing opportunities. I've seen many schools in the few years I've been here and most of them still spend 75% or more of their day on reading, writing and maths, with no opportunity for learners to have any input into their education. I see teachers working themselves silly trying to make sure they see four reading groups, three writing groups and four maths groups every day. More than ever, some schools are treating education like an industrial process, putting children on an endless conveyor belt towards the teacher. 

I wish every educator in New Zealand could read this book and see what is actually possible in this amazing system. There is so much innovation and amazing things being done, it sometimes saddens me to still see children trudging through their school days just getting through a school day or worse, feeling disengaged and powerless in their lives. We've lost sight of what is possible and what success really means in our schools. Richard Wells has done a great and necessary job in reminded all of us what we actually have and offers glimpses of what's possible.

If you are an educator anywhere, try to find the time to read this amazing book and share it with your colleagues. Surely it will open your eyes!

#HiveSummit Day One - Rabbi Michael Cohen

A few weeks ago I signed up for the Hive Summit, an online summit that would include several speakers over a week or two. You still sign up for it on the site.

The first video came out yesterday and featured Michael Cohen (no, not the one that's making the news in the US right now - Rabbit Michael Cohen, who was a keynote at ISTE recently). He spoke at length about Creativity, Design Thinking and Entrepreneurship.

It was an amazing talk to start off the summit, and I hope that future videos are just as impactful and inspiring.

Cohen first talked about the nature of creativity. He says (and I've thought this for a long time) that creativity isn't invention, it's the taking of existing ideas and putting them together in combinations that no one else has done before. His example is of Steve Jobs, who took a lot of existing technologies and combined them to make an iPhone. Cohen (and cohost Michael Matera) also argues that creativity isn't an innate thing, but that it needs to be practiced to be improved.

In a discussion around the 30 Circles challenge (where the challenge is to use 30 circles to draw everyday items in 3 minutes) he brought up the idea of Functional Fixedness. That describes the idea that often we think that something only has one use and one use only. We don't always see the different way something can be used and therefore cannot think creatively. However, once we discover our limitations it opens up our minds to different ways of thinking. This activity can lead to very rich discussions about what creativity is and how it can be fine tuned.

The second part of Cohen's talk has to do with Design Thinking (DT). This is something near and dear to me and has been something I've been working on understanding and implementing for the past year now.  Most people who learn about DT know that it centres around empathy and finding ways to solve a problem for someone else, or as Cohen puts it:  "Let me understand you, so that I can help you solve the problem for yourself." He goes on to explain that DT helps us build better relationships. Despite the obviousness of his statement, I had never actually thought of this before. DT makes us think about someone else's needs and helps us work with them. This is definitely something which will help frame my interactions with DT in the future.

In the last part of his talk, Cohen discusses building an Entrepreneurial Spirit amongst our learners. That simply means that we want them to have that grit and resilience to keep going when things don't work. To keep on trying things and trying things until we get where we want to get. He says that big things happen due to years of effort, but that we only see the end part of that effort. We miss the failures and the late nights and all the sacrifices and think that making something new is all about being famous and reaping the rewards of the hard work that we never saw. I tweeted out a quote from this part of the discussion and I think it's so relevant to everyone, especially schools. My future school also needs to look at this and find our own path to success and not be blinded by the amazing schools we see.

Don't compare your beginning with someone else's beginning. That's their success; they've been slaving away at it for a long time @mrmatera @TheTechRabbi #HiveSummit #DesignThinking

— Michael Davidson (@michaelteacher) August 1, 2018

This was an amazing talk and I recommend it for EVERYONE. Understanding the things Michael Cohen is saying is something that will help bring any school forward into the 22nd century and beyond. I am so excited to continue doing the things I was doing and adapting those new ideas he has given me.

Here's a sketchnote of  the talk (I didn't do it) that was included in the materials for the talk: 

If you haven't signed up already, I urge you to do so as this was an amazing talk! Watch this space for some more reactions to the talks that I watch.

Book Review: Rosie Revere, Engineer

For a while I've been eying several books that would help support STEAM or Maker activities in the classroom. Rosie Revere, Engineer has been one that I've wanted to get for a while, so a few weeks ago, I ordered it off of The Book Depository. The story itself is a very nice tale of a shy girl who used to create a lot of creative and different inventions, but has been silenced because of the reaction of a family member. She learns later, from a family member that it's not about getting things perfect on the first go. This fits in perfectly with both the idea of Growth Mindset and the Design Thinking process.

There is a lot of potential for this book to lead into many different learning opportunities and ideas. It would be a great way to start a project where children build or create something.

But that's not all. There is also a companion book, Rosie Revere's Big Project Book for Bold Engineers, which gives an incredible amount of ideas to build upon the first book. You can find it at The Book Depository as well.

Though the book is primarily meant for individual children (it has many places for a child to draw or write) it can easily be adapted for a whole class to get them thinking in new and creative ways. As an adult, I was personally excited about the things in this book and potentially trying some of them on my own.

In the book there is a good deal of supporting information about engineers and engineering, as well as some advice about organizing your own "treasure" so that you can make your own inventions. There are also some step-by-step instructions to make a few different creative things (a small catapult and a solar oven).

The genius of this book does not end there though. There are also many real world challenges where the book asks readers to try to solve a specific problem in their own creative way. It also highlights the importance of "flops" and making mistakes.

At 94 pages this definitely is a recommended purchase for any classroom trying to bring out the creativity in children. It not only encourages children to build and invent things, but it gives them a few different methods and tons of inspiration.

There are a few other books in this series, so perhaps look for the reviews of those in the near future.

Organizing an ILE (Part 3)

One of the challenges (or opportunities) that exists when teaching and working in a large space with many learners and many educators is that sometimes the children don't get to know all the other children. In a massive group, surprisingly enough, the same children tend to work with each other when given the choice.

As learning coaches, when we saw this we weren't too sure that this was the best for our learners. We wanted them to develop social skills that would enable them to work with anyone. We also wanted our learners to be able to reflect on their work, with someone who was a safe friend (or even a critical friend).

So we came up with the idea of having learning buddies. The idea was that whenever we had the whole group of them together, they would be sitting with their buddy. If we asked them to discuss anything, it would be with this buddy. So we made a list, which we started rotating every week and thought it would go smoothly. I guess by now I should know that nothing every goes smoothly. Some of our learners were doing as we asked and trying to have conversations with the correct buddy. But others were bringing their buddy with them and sitting next to their friend and talking to their friend. There was a lot of frustration.

Our initial thought was to put a forced seating plan in place so that they couldn't sit by their buddy. But cooler heads prevailed and we took advantage of a day when half of the learners were out testing to run a mini design thinking workshop. We identified the problem to the learners and we examined why this particular response was occurring.

The overall theme to the responses was that they didn't know their buddy and that they were more comfortable with their friends. Some of the buddies were goofing off so they wanted to make sure they talked to someone. We identified that the main problem was that they didn't have enough time to get to know there buddies. So we framed our How Might We question as:

How might we get to know our learning buddies better so that we talk to them and not our friends? (it may not have been exactly this wording).

From there were had the children do a crazy eights activity to come up with some possible solutions. Each child picked their favourite and pitched it to a partner. Each pair chose their favourite in that group and then pitched it to another pair. This continued until we had two ideas facing off against each other.

To be honest, all of the ideas were pretty good, but I liked both of the final two the best. The first was to have the buddies interview each other and the second was to have the play a game together. We combined both and changed the turnover rate between buddies. So every two weeks when they got a new buddy, there was a list of questions to ask each other AND we gave them a task to complete with the buddy. Those tasks were things such as: make a secret handshake, make something out of 10 lego pieces or design a logo for you and your buddy.

Things went a lot more smoothly after this. I can't say whether or not that was due to the fact that we did some interventions or the fact that the children were actually heard and empathized with (which is a big part of a design thinking approach). Either way, as the term went on, we as learning coaches did notice some interesting interactions and a growing sense of community amongst the learners. This effort was only a small part of our larger efforts but the idea itself AND the trouble shooting we did with the learners clearly has had some impact on the way our habitat runs.

Fourth Time's a Charm, or I'm a Google Certified Innovator

Three times before I have applied for the Google Innovator Academy and three times I have received the rejection email with varying degrees of dismay. But each time I refused to give up, knowing that if I kept at it, I would be selected. That being said, I was still quite nervous for this current round, since it was in my part of the world.

I was not to be dismayed this time. While on vacation in New York City, I had a flurry of activity on my phone, which all indicated that I had been accepted. I was extremely busy at the time so it took a while for everything to sink it. After my holiday, I came back to a very busy school term, so was also quite rushed for time.  That being said, I still managed to get everything done in time for the academy, which was probably one of the best experiences I've ever had.

If I had to choose what my favourite part of the two and a half days, I'd have a real problem. Pretty much all of it was incredible. The best I can do is point out two aspects of the academy that will likely be instrumental in going forward: The connections with other innovative educators around the globe and the design thinking process.

With me at the academy were 36 other educators, and many coaches and other EdTech experts. My close team, the Lucky Unkos made immediate and strong bonds with each other, and functioned not only as a well-oiled machine in all the activities we did, but also ended up winning quite a few things (or coming close seconds). By going through the process together, we formed something of a family group together and will now have each other to lean on through difficult times. One of my good online (and in person) colleagues was actually placed in this group, so it was nice to have that, but it was also nice to work closely with others in this capacity.

The whole point of the academy was to help each of us work on an identified problem in education and to develop a solution to it through the design process. Though I had had some experience with this, clearly I didn't know enough, because over the 2 and a half days I was immersed into the world of design thinking in a way that I could never have imagined. We started from the beginning by looking at all of the reasons why the problem exists and then examining the person (or people) to whom our solution is directed at. We spent lots of time slowly developing our ideas and giving each other feedback. Eventually we all developed a prototype of what our solution will be.

This process was absolutely amazing and I've already brought in many of the ideas into my practice. In our iExplore block, I've taken four of my groups and run through a watered down (but still pretty robust) version of this with the projects they had been working on.  Already the results have been pretty positive with all four groups working on some pretty interesting solutions (so watch this space in the coming weeks when I'll have time to share what they did in more depth).

My actual project is based on helping educators integrate coding into the curriculum. Here in New Zealand, computational thinking is meant to be part of the curriculum next year. Before the academy I did a survey and found that many educators were not teaching it (about 50%) and those that were had had very little training or support. So I wanted to change that. After the whole process at the academy, I decided on making a storyboard of a video for my prototype. I'm currently in the process of turning that storyboard into a script which will then be filmed. It has been a busy few weeks since I came back (mostly taken up with ERO and some big personal things), so I'm hopefully going to find some time in the coming week to work on it. At any rate, I was matched with my mentor today, so that's another great step in this whole process. I look forward to sharing with everyone how this project is going in the future!